Render’s Latest Betrayal: Or How My Logs Quietly Became Someone Else’s Asset

I woke up to an email from Render today. Not a warning. Not a discussion. Just a calm, corporate notification delivered with the same emotional weight as a billing reminder.

They’re adding ClickHouse as a subprocessor.

Here’s the line they think makes it all fine:

“On February 1, 2026, Render will add ClickHouse, Inc. to its platform as a new subprocessor.”

Subprocessor. A word designed to dull the nervous system. A word that means your data now belongs to another entity, but said gently enough that you’re supposed to nod and move on.

I’ve been using Render because it’s been the least painful compromise between control and convenience. AWS is psychological warfare. GCP feels like a compliance maze run by lawyers. Render felt small enough to still pretend developers mattered.

This email ends that illusion.

What’s Actually Happening

Render says this is about improving log search performance across the dashboard, API, and CLI. Faster queries. Better UX. The usual story.

What that actually means: My application logs — request metadata, execution traces, failure states, timing data — are now being ingested, indexed, and persisted by ClickHouse.

Not my ClickHouse. Their ClickHouse.

And before anyone says “it’s just logs”: if you build AI systems, logs are not trivia. They are behavior. They are memory. They are the shadow record of models evolving, failing, adapting.

Logs are where the truth lives.

“Data Residency” Is a Comfort Blanket

They reassure us by saying each region has its own ClickHouse database to “maintain data residency.”

This is theater.

Geography doesn’t protect you from process. Jurisdiction doesn’t matter when the risk surface is code paths, access controls, internal tooling, and human beings with credentials.

ClickHouse is impressive tech. I’ve read the docs. Petabyte-scale analytics, sub-second queries, beautiful benchmarks. I don’t doubt their engineering.

What I doubt is the idea that my experimental systems — the ones that reflect how I think, how I design, how I fail — should be piped into an external analytics company by default.

Security pages always say the same things:

•	Encryption at rest

•	Encryption in transit

•	Role-based access

•	Compliance acronyms

None of that answers the only question that matters:

Who else gets to look?

This Is Personal (Whether They Like It or Not)

AI development isn’t just shipping CRUD apps. My logs are not anonymized telemetry from a weather widget.

They contain:

•	Model behavior under stress

•	Data flow patterns

•	Prompt structures

•	Edge cases that reveal intent

•	Failure modes that map directly to intellectual property

These systems are extensions of cognition. Externalizing their memory without consent feels invasive in a way that’s hard to explain unless you build things this way.

Imagine someone recording your internal monologue “to improve performance.”

That’s what this feels like.

And the best part? “This change requires no action on your part.”

Which is corporate for: you don’t get a choice.

This Is How It Always Goes

This isn’t unique to Render. It’s the cloud industry’s favorite move.

Add a layer. Add a partner. Add a subprocessor. Normalize it through silence.

GitHub. AWS. Snowflake. Every platform eventually reaches the point where your data stops being yours and starts being infrastructure fuel.

The outrage only ever comes later — after the breach, the subpoena, the “unexpected access,” the apology blog post written by legal.

ClickHouse talks endlessly about real-time analytics.

No one talks about real-time exposure.

What I Want (And Won’t Get)

Here’s what should exist:

1.	Total data export — before February 1st, not after. I want to see exactly what’s being handed off.

2.	Independent audits — not marketing PDFs, actual third-party assessments.

3.	Opt-out controls — real ones. Not “leave the platform.”

4.	Recognition that developer data is IP — not just operational exhaust.

None of this will happen. I know that. You probably do too.

So What Now?

If you’re on Render, read your inbox carefully.

If you’re building AI systems, understand this: the cloud is not neutral. It never was. Every convenience is a trade. Every abstraction leaks eventually.

Railway. Fly.io. Self-hosting. Pick your poison — but at least know what you’re swallowing.

Render didn’t do something uniquely evil. They did something predictable.

And predictability, at this stage of the game, is the real danger.

Trust evaporates slowly, then all at once.

Mine’s gone.

Stay awake.

The machines aren’t just watching anymore — they’re indexing.